A messy story stops 'Terminator Genisys' from being a great sequel

In "Terminator Genisys," "Game of Thrones" star Emilia
Clarke is the latest actress to play Sarah
Connor.Paramount
Pictures

Maybe in the next "Terminator" movie they can go back in time and
make some script revisions.

"Terminator Genisys," the latest sequel to the time-traveling
sci-fi franchise, adds yet another timeline to puzzle over.
“Genisys” begins in a familiar place as a companion of sorts
to the first film, and then criss-crosses across
dimensions.

"Genisys" kicks off in the future, where Kyle Reese (Jai
Courtney) fights with mankind's last hope John Connor (Jason
Clarke) in the resistance. John finds out that Skynet, the evil
robotic corporation that turned against mankind, plans to
kill his mother, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), to prevent him
from ever being born. He sends Reese over to protect her and just
like that, we are back to “The Terminator” in 1984.

Suddenly, T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) has made its way into the 1980s
as well as some other major changes to this timeline. Once again,
fate has been messed with in a major way.

Early on, some scenes from the original "Terminator" are
re-created, and they're both kind of cool and a little
uncanny to watch.

It is as if they're saying, "Here is how we would have made that
classic scene if we had this technology back then,"
despite the fact that the aged effects actually add some charm to
the early films. This might have come off as nostalgic pandering,
but the filmmakers literally had no choice, given that they
didn't have the rights to footage from the original film owned by
Orion and Hemdale.

"Genisys" contains a lot of callbacks to the first
film.Paramount
Pictures

Naturally, the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is back, and
he wants to remind you why he became a movie star in the
first place. As James Cameron realized with the first two films,
Schwarzenegger is at his best in silence. This brings out both
his funniest and most menacing qualities.

In "Genisys," the way he tries to smile like a normal human is
worth it for all the clunky time travel exposition he has to
deliver throughout.

This is simply a preview
of the creepy Arnold smiles you can expect.Terminator Genisys/Paramount
Pictures

It is also a shame that Emilia Clarke, who is so great as Mother
of Dragons Daenerys Targaryen on “Game of Thrones,” doesn’t get
as much of a chance as she deserves as Sarah Connor. In
"Thrones," Clarke brings a lot of compassion to a tough
character, the same way Linda Hamilton did with Sarah Connor.
However, Clarke has to wade through so much weak dialogue
that she barely gets to showcase her talent.

"John sent me here to save you," Reese says at one point.

"From the Terminator that was sent back to kill me, I know. But
don't worry, we already took care of him," Connor replies.

Lines like this feel less like something a human would say in an
emergency and more like a moment tailored for a movie trailer.

As the franchise has carried on, Schwarzenegger has gone
from terrifying killer to father figure.

Sarah even refers to him as "pops." This relationship borders on
sappy (The Terminator collected her childhood drawings), but at
moments it really clicks. In an early scene, Terminator hits
Reese over the head and lets Sarah know that he did not kill him
(this is something of a callback to "Terminator 2"). Their
chemistry in this scene and others can be endearing.

Other times, it's a bit weird. Cyborgs aren't supposed to
feel, as we're reminded numerous times, so it's strange when you
see him holding on to items of sentimental value, like childhood
drawings of himself and Sarah pinned to a wall. Somewhere buried
deep in here, is a fun spin-off about the misadventures of Sarah
Connor and her T-800.

The biggest problem with "Genisys" is that the script is a
complete mess, and the idea of re-launching the franchise is
bogged down in franchise nostalgia.

T-800 (Arnold
Schwarzenegger) has become more empathetic since the original
"Terminator."Paramount/Terminator:
Genisys

That's not to say nostalgia can't be done right.

Take one or two of the scenes
in “Jurassic
World.” That stuff had been
dormant for a long time, yet always present in popular culture.
Given that Arnold most recently turned “I’ll be back” into a
punchline in "The Expendables
2," this line no longer feels special anymore.

The “Terminator” franchise was once groundbreaking in many
ways.

By sticking with a PG-13 rating, “Genisys” lacks the
edge of the first two “Terminator” movies. After all, the first
one feels less like a summer blockbuster and more like “No
Country for Old Men” but with a cyborg. 1991's “Judgment Day”
truly made you believe that its villain could not be
destroyed. In “Genisys,” the central villain is an Apple-like
operating system, clearly as a way to mine off of modern tech
fears. From the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation to
the modern fear that Siri could murder us, you've got to hand it
to the "Terminator" franchise: it has closely followed both
the evolution and the downside of technology for the past 31
years.

Still, modern AI was tackled in a much bolder way in this year’s
“Ex
Machina.”

However, like some of its predecessors “Genisys” is a
tour-de-force of visual effects. The fights are all solid, and
one scene in which a bus dangles off the Golden Gate Bridge
is especially eye-popping through a pair of 3D glasses.

This makes for good summer fun, but again, it all goes back to
the story, and it feels like if this franchise truly wants to
reboot itself, then it needs to stay away from time travel
because it has more than run that idea into the ground.

Visual effects have come a long way since
1984.Paramount
Pictures

"Terminator Genisys" is about the fight to
save humanity, so the stakes should feel higher than ever.
However, it is hard to have any emotional stakes if you can
change everything by simply adjusting the timelines. T-800 has
already come back from the dead enough.

With one character too many confronting their younger selves, the
time travel science reaches a level of unintentional self-parody.
It is less elegant than “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and more
like “Austin Powers.” Even with great action, “Genisys” gets
bogged down by science that it really doesn’t understand. The
thing that once made the "Terminator" movies so great might now
be a bigger threat than Skynet.